Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Television - General

Funny, lively and unpredictable, stand-up comedy is above all a medium to be enjoyed. Popular as a good night out and packing the TV schedules, stand-up permeates British society and culture.

Ubiquitous though it is, we are generally reluctant to consider comedy's social consequences. When comedians offend we seem ready to consider the potential for stand-up to do some wider harm, yet we rarely consider the good that it might do.

This book looks at the social and political impact of stand-up comedy in both its positive and negative forms. Drawing on exclusive interviews with...

Funny, lively and unpredictable, stand-up comedy is above all a medium to be enjoyed. Popular as a good night out and packing the TV schedules, stand-up permeates British society and culture.

Ubiquitous though it is, we are generally reluctant to consider comedy's social consequences. When comedians offend we seem ready to consider the potential for stand-up to do some wider harm, yet we rarely consider the good that it might do.

This book looks at the social and political impact of stand-up comedy in both its positive and negative forms. Drawing on exclusive interviews with...

From HGTV and the Food Network to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, television is preoccupied with the pursuit and exhibition of lifestyle. Lifestyle TV analyzes a burgeoning array of lifestyle formats on network and cable channels, from how-to and advice programs to hybrid reality entertainment built around the cultivation of the self as project, the ethics of everyday life, the mediation of style and taste, the regulation of health and the body, and the performance of identity and "difference." Ouellette situates these formats historically, arguing that the lifestyling...

From HGTV and the Food Network to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, television is preoccupied with the pursuit and exhibition of lifestyle. Lifestyle TV analyzes a burgeoning array of lifestyle formats on network and cable channels, from how-to and advice programs to hybrid reality entertainment built around the cultivation of the self as project, the ethics of everyday life, the mediation of style and taste, the regulation of health and the body, and the performance of identity and "difference." Ouellette situates these formats historically, arguing that the lifestyling...

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction?

Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral...

Is Democracy overrated?

Does power corrupt? Or do corrupt people seek power?

Do corporate puppet masters pull politicians' strings?

Why does Frank talk to the camera?

Can politics deliver on the promise of justice?

Mediating Sexual Citizenship considers how the neoliberal imperatives of adaptation, improvement and transformation that inform the shifting artistic and industrial landscape of television, are increasingly indexed to performed disruptions in the norms of sexuality and gender. Drawing on examples from a range of television genres (quality drama, reality television, talk shows, sitcoms) and outlets (network, cable, subscription video on demand), the analysis in this book demonstrates how, as one of the most dominant cultural technologies, television plays a critical role in the...

Anna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at East Carolina University, USA

Stacy Takacs is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of television for women . In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender, still matter?

The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also...

What is it like to make television comedy? How do writers get their ideas made, and how do commissioners and producers decide what to make? How do members of the comedy industry work with large broadcasters and production companies, and what does it mean to be creative and stay creative?

Drawing on interviews with many key writers such as Sam Bain, Paul Doolan, Graham Linehan, David Mitchell, Simon Nye and Sue Teddern, producers including Ash Atalla, Lisa Clark, Michelle Farr, Ali McPhail, Jon Plowman and Adam Tandy, and commissioners, the BBC s Shane Allen, Channel 4 s...

Stephanie Pratt is the consummate reality star.

Since 2007, her life has been lived almost as much on the small screen as off it, and constantly analysed in gossip columns. In Made in Reality, Stephanie gives an exclusive insight into the trials and tribulations of life on reality TV, taking us behind the scenes of The Hills, Made in Chelsea and even the Big Brother House.

In her tell- all autobiography, nothing is off-limits, from the drama of her relationship with Spencer Matthews to her issues with her...

This book examines music entertainment programmes on China Central Television, China's only national level television network, as well as on nationally-available provincial channels, exploring how such programmes project a nuanced image of China's identity and position in the world. It shows how the images presented - primarily to domestic audiences - are in step with China's party-state nationalism, and at the same time flexible and open to change as China's circumstances change. The book contextualises identity construction in the media by examining the development of television in China...